It was the worst defence. It was the most powerful.
Upstairs, the windows grinned with dolls. There was no way out of them. Richard had a fear of falling from heights, and the sensation of plummeting when he reached for the window handles was sickening. Susan was less vertiginous, but even so she couldn’t open the panes. Her body went weak with the sense of falling miles down a vertical cliff.
Michael had imprisoned them as effectively as if he had closed and locked the bars of a cage.
At two in the morning the house began to freeze. The family dressed in overcoats and scarves as the temperature dropped rapidly. The central heating pumped hard but the flames in the boiler didn’t seem to heat the water in the radiators. Nor did the oven work. They found two electric fan heaters but the air that was emitted was icy, even when set for high temperature.
Quickly, Richard laid a fire, but this too was frustrated: as he struck the paper alight a stinking breeze blew down the chimney and extinguished the flames. The smell was sulphurous and acrid. When he shone a torch up the chimney shaft he could see a bulging, ebony face and dangling ribbons, something wedged across the airway, staring downwards.
Carol was awake again now, and warmly wrapped. She was very quiet as she sat, huddled in blankets, on the sofa. Breath frosting she sang a song to herself, staring all the time through the French windows to where the outline of the totem could just be seen.
Susan tried phoning Françoise again, but there was no reply. She called Jenny but the number was permanently engaged, the phone off the hook perhaps, or Michael interfering with the line. When she tried a neighbour she found the same problem. She dialled numbers at random, working through her address book.
Only the number for Françoise Jeury’s home worked.
‘He’s cut us off. Except for Françoise. He’s freezing us out. Except for his friend. But she’s not there …’
Carol sang her song, a simple nursery rhyme tune. After a while Susan listened a little more attentively to the barely audible words that emerged from the huddled, frozen child.
‘Watching-man comes out of the ground, watching-man comes out of the wood, watching-man can see me here, but can’t harm me if I watch him good …’
‘Are you making that up?’ Susan asked as she cuddled closer to her daughter.
‘It’s Michael’s song,’ Carol whispered. ‘He said he wouldn’t hurt me and he wouldn’t let Chalk Boy hurt me. He taught me the song in case Chalk Boy tried to trap me.’
Richard was by the window, staring through the frost into the winter’s night. He smiled as he listened to Carol talk, then said, ‘I think we’d all better learn to sing the song of the watching-man …’
At dawn the ice began to melt and the house warmed up. As the frost faded from the glass, the pale sun cast the long shadows of totems across the sitting-room floor. The kitchen was similarly darkened by shadow, and the family moved tentatively upstairs to Carol’s room, the only space where they felt unwatched and unthreatened.
THIRTY-THREE
Michael was in the room again. Carol sat up slowly, drawing the blankets round her shoulders. A grey dawn light made the room seem cold. Over by the wardrobe was an area of darkness, and Michael was lurking there.
The room was warm. It also smelled sweetly of summer flowers. Carol watched the patch of darkness, aware that the whole house was murmuring around her.
‘Michael?’
The darkness shifted.
Something scurried across the floor, too fast for her to see it, and the curtains closed over the window, blocking out the encroaching day. In total darkness, she felt the small, bony hand on her shoulder. The bed shifted as a weight moved on to the mattress. Her hair was ruffled, the lobe of her ear tweaked.
‘Michael … don’t tease …’
‘Not Michael.’
The voice was the winter voice. It was cold air on her ears, and frost to her nose. The words were rasped from the invisible thing, and again the lobe of her ear was tugged between tiny, bony fingers.
‘I know who you are. You’re pretending to be Chalk Boy. But you’re Michael.’
‘Not Michael!’
Her ear was pinched, and she stifled the yell, but slapped at the tiny tormentor. ‘Watcher-man, off you go, or out of the window your wood I’ll throw!’
Laughter from the fetch. It dropped off the bed and lurked again in darkness. She could hear its movement, sense its single, open eye (the other was quite blind. She had established that the night before by shining a torch at it).
Hissing: ‘Not the watching-man. Can’t frighten me.’
‘You can’t frighten me either. You’re Michael. You want food. I’ll bring it when I can …’
‘Food now. Food now.’
‘When I can. Now go away.’
‘NOW!’ breathed the fetch.
Carol picked up a book from her bedside table and threw it at the elemental.
‘When are you going to let Mummy and Daddy out of the house? It’s time you stopped being angry.’
‘Food!’ said the wooden thing.
‘I’ll bring it when I can. How do I get out of the house? You’ve blocked us in. And there isn’t much food anyway. We’re eating it all. There’s not much for you. Or Chalk Boy. Why don’t you eat chalk?’
She giggled. ‘You could have urchin stew. Sea urchin stew.’
The fetch scurried around for a moment, and Carol savoured the mixed smells of winter and summer as cold air and the scent of rose-hip drifted through her room. Then she heard the voice start to sing in its tiny, reedy voice, ‘Watching-man, watching-man, sing to him and run if you can …’
‘I’ll try,’ Carol said. ‘But if you make me frightened I won’t come to the quarry. Now go away. I’ve got to get dressed.’
The entity returned to darkness. Carol got out of bed and opened the door to the landing, feeling the fetch’s icy breath on her legs as it scurried into the house. With the door closed she opened the curtains again, then dressed in jeans and a jumper. She made her bed, carried her hot-water bottle to the bathroom, and emptied it into the basin. Her bladder was full, and she eyed the closed toilet with some apprehension, but then lifted the lid and poured in some Ajax liquid. Staring into the toilet she satisfied herself that there were no things down there (yesterday’s encounter had been terrifying!) then sat down for a minute or so, although all the time she was relieving herself she peered between her legs into the dully reflecting liquid below.
Flushing the toilet she thumbed her nose at the swirling waters (‘Drown, drown, all spooks down!’), then closed the lid.
Her parents were sleeping in the sitting room, huddled together in blankets on the sofa. Carol thought that the sound of the toilet flushing would wake them, but they remained in pale, agitated slumber in the cold room.
After peering in at the body masses of her parents, Carol went into the kitchen, aware of the shadow of the totem outside the back door now being cast across the floor by the first stray light of dawn. She raided the fridge for cheese and ham, then cut several slices of bread from a farmhouse cob. Michael liked sweetcorn pickle, so she packed a jar of the relish into the same carrier bag that she now filled with these simple supplies. What would he want to drink? There was no milk. She found a can of Coca-Cola and a half-finished bottle of ginger beer.
She tied the top of the bag, then unlocked the back door—
‘What are you doing? Come back. Come back at once!’
Her mother was in the doorway. Sleepy, dishevelled, holding her housecoat closed around her body.
‘Come back. Do you hear me?’
Behind Carol, the totem vibrated, and its cold power reached into the kitchen. For a moment Susan’s eyes widened and her resolve lessened. She was distracted by the power of the barrier, the totem or fetch that guarded the back entrance. But then, like the mother she was, her fears for her daughter overwhelmed the fear of the outside force.
Her voice angry, her focus sharp, she came ru
nning for Carol. ‘Get back here! Don’t go out. Don’t go!’
Carol ran from the house. The totem swathed her in its fear. She struggled against the cold, against the feeling of being throttled, then called, ‘Watching-man, let me go …’
The force faded. She heard laughter from across the field, from away in the distance. Looking up at the totem she kicked it. The wood shuddered, leaned a little more towards the house.
Her mother was screaming. Carol ran.
A chalk shape now guarded the entrance to the quarry. It was as high as a tree, a stooped figure, arms tucked into its sides, hair, chipped and scoured from the chalk, depicted as hanging lank. The face was hidden. The creature seemed to be asleep on its legs, but there was something in the coarse, rain-roughened effigy that suggested it was ready to stand erect and pursue.
Carol stood before this monstrous statue, clutching the plastic bag of food and calling for Michael. She heard his laughter distantly, but was still too frightened to move.
‘Don’t let it hurt me!’ she cried defiantly, then again remembered the fetch/Michael’s instructions for safety.
‘Watching-man, go away. Chalk Man stay.’
Had the statue shifted?
Her hair pricked and her heart raced, but it was just cloud shadow across the gleaming chalk. The effigy was quite still. Quite dead.
‘I’m going past,’ she shouted at it. ‘I’m bringing him food. So stay asleep!’
She stalked down the right-hand path, but as she passed the chalk giant she broke into a run, not looking back as she fled through the bushes, tripping and skidding on the scatter of perfect fossilized heart-urchins and iron marcasite balls that made this castle approach so hazardous.
Suddenly confused, she stopped, clutching at the bag nervously. She had been walking towards the far wall, where she could see the remains of the rope ladder dangling from the leaning elm, but now found herself facing back the way she had come. There was that continual and unwelcome smell of sea and rotting weed, but the quarry had become breezy now, a chill wind that stirred the gorse and bushes.
‘Michael?’
She turned again and started to walk deeper into the pit. The chill seeped quickly into her bones and she started to tremble, shaking quite violently. She stepped back a few paces and the tension in her body faded.
Skirting this odd place, she became entangled in bushes, protecting her face with her arm as she edged cautiously deeper.
Something crunched beneath her foot. Looking down she gasped as she saw the china face of one of her mother’s dolls, now cracked into little bits.
‘Michael …’ she whispered, shocked. The doll’s arms were further up the track. She found the plastic body of another, stripped of its clothes, discarded, then the luxurious red hair of the Victorian doll that Susan had found in London, years ago, and which had perhaps belonged to a Royal princess.
So intent was she on searching for the scattered remnants of these toys, that she came into the graveyard clearing without realizing it. When she looked up she gasped with horror.
A single thorn tree grew there, thick-trunked, twisted, its branches reaching across the space. From its branches dangled the corpses of dolls; dark, shrouded effigies, hung by necks and arms, some with grinning faces, others with small, peering eyes, some colourful in Red Indian dress, others in furs and moccasins, but mostly swathed in torn, spectral rags. They dangled there like the shrivelled corpses of squirrels which could sometimes be found in Hawkinge Wood after the squirrel man had completed his autumn murder.
Around the tree were the discarded bodies of her mother’s precious collection. They had all been stripped. The clothes had been tied into a single, long braid, which dangled from the highest branch of the thorn, moving in the breeze.
Carol felt sick. The dead dolls on the branch seemed to watch her as they fluttered and swung. Old sounds from old years ebbed and flowed through her mind. Old winds, old fires, ancient songs, the last spirits of the spirit dolls. She turned to leave this mortuary place.
He was in front of her before she was aware of his approach. One moment she had been edging through the underbrush, back to the chalk effigy, the next he was there, white-painted and naked, grinning at her. His ginger hair was spiky. He had rubbed chalk into it and made it stiff.
‘You look funny,’ she said to him.
‘So do you,’ he retorted sharply, then reached for the carrier bag. ‘I’m starving.’
‘It’s all I could find. There isn’t much food left. Why did you kill Mummy’s dolls?’
He ignored her question, peering at the contents of the bag and looking angry. ‘Bread and cheese. And ginger beer. Ah. Pickle!’
He led her out of the tangled wood, then opened the jar of sweetcorn pickle and scooped the contents out with his fingers, licking his whitened lips as the sweet sludge was swallowed. “Love chutney.”
‘I’ll try and find some more. Why do you cover yourself with chalk?’
‘Secret.’
‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘Michael’s cold. Not me. I’m Chalk Boy.’ He laughed and threw the empty pickle jar into the bushes, then licked his fingers again. ‘You thought I was Michael, didn’t you! Didn’t you!’
‘You are Michael.’
He tapped a finger to her nose. His breath smelled of relish, but was also unpleasant. ‘Wrong. Michael’s hiding. I’ve banished him.’
‘To the wooden doll?’
For a moment Michael looked puzzled, then he understood his sister’s meaning. ‘Clever, eh? It’s a living doll, a little wooden puppet that runs on fragments of people’s soul. I just hitch-hiked a ride on it, into the house. It was funny watching Mummy and Daddy from the shelf as they looked for me.’
Michael emptied the rest of the bag’s contents on to the ground and picked up the bread, tearing it into chunks and swallowing the morsels whole.
‘You’re just showing off,’ Carol said irritably. ‘You want to pretend you’re wild. But you’re just my brother.’
‘Michael’s your brother. But not really,’ he emphasized.
‘I’m going home now. I’ll try and find some more pickles.’
She turned and started to run, but a body slammed into her from behind, knocking her down. She struggled and screamed, but the hands on her arms were too strong. Distantly, from a million miles away it seemed, she could hear her father’s voice, raised in alarm, screaming her name.
She twisted on the ground and fought at Chalk Boy, raking her nails through the white on his face and grazing his skin beneath. Angrily, roaring with a childish fury, he jumped up, then hauled his sister to her feet.
‘I’m not finished with you! I don’t want you to go yet.’
‘I’m frightened,’ she howled, and let the tears come. Again she turned, but took only a step or two away from the quarry before she saw the arched, sinister back of the chalk giant.
Her father’s voice was a distressed cry, again from a long way off.
The hand that touched her shoulder was more gentle, now, and she turned to look at her brother, seeing tears in the bloodshot eyes that stared from the flaking, scratched mask of white.
‘Got something for you,’ he whispered. ‘Want you to bring it out of Limbo.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘Got to come and see. Got to follow me. Won’t frighten you again.’
‘Why are you talking like that?’
‘Carol … please come with me. I want you to fetch home the Grail. I’ve found the Grail. Please come with me. Fetch it home …’
She hesitated for just a moment, conscious of the closer sound of her father, of his distress as he approached the pit, but aware too of a strange, almost radiant power coming from Michael. He seemed serene, all of a sudden, and his smile was genuine. His eyes sparkled. He had reached a hand towards her and she took it, now, and squeezed his fingers.
‘You’ve really found the Grail?’
‘I really have. And now everythi
ng will be all right. But I need you to carry it home. Are you coming?’
‘Don’t hurt them any more. Please? Mikey?’
A shadow passed over the face of the chalked boy, but then he smiled again. ‘I’ll see what Michael has to say. But I won’t hurt you. I promise. Come on.’ He tugged at the girl, and Carol, after a moment’s resistance, let herself be led by the hand, along the winding path, deeper into the quarry.
A moment later, a great and terrifying sea was breaking on to the shore before her, and the spray from the giant waves had drenched her as she stood and stared in shock! Something raised a vast head across the ocean and bellowed, sending creatures scurrying up among the caves. Purple light flickered and flared and a dull roll of thunder made the ground shake—
Carol saw little of this. She had screamed, turned and run, Michael chasing close behind, angrily calling to her.
He caught her when she was weaving hysterically between the inner bushes of the quarry. She was unaware of the transition from beach to pit. There had been no disorientation at all.
‘Come back!’ Michael growled, and tugged at her long hair, jerking her head. The sudden pain made her furious and she turned and kicked her brother’s naked shin. He hopped back, holding his leg, then shouted, ‘Please! Just come to the shrine and take the Grail for me. I need you to. The beach is just where Chalk Boy lives. It’s his dream. Nothing can hurt you. It isn’t really there. It’s Limbo …’
‘That’s why I’m wet. And it smells.’ Water still dripped from her hair and clothes, rank smelling and sharply tangy.
‘You’ve got to help me—’ Michael growled, and he was suddenly menacing. Carol was about to run again, when a voice called down into the quarry.
The Fetch Page 28
